Ever Wonder.............?

[Goeduck]

Ever wonder why some things are done the way they are?

Well, read the following and maybe that will answer your question.



Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells? Well, just remember that bureaucracies live forever. Here is a prime example.........

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. So the next time you are handed a spec and told we have always done it that way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story....

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Morton Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to
run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass............

And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important ??

 

[Walter]

I love that story. I'd like it even more if it were true.

 

[scuberd]

Walter once bubbled...
I love that story. I'd like it even more if it were true.

ok smarty, how is it not true?

 

[Walter]

...........but the story itself is false. Go to Urban legends for more details.

The part about railroad gauge is actually mostly true, although US railroads were not built by English expatriates. The English railroads did get started before those in the US and English equipment was purchased for US railroads, so standards gauges were helpful, although far from universal in the US. At least three different gauges were used in US railroads, especially in the south. Northermers rebuilt southern railroads after the War of Yankee Agression which is what finally standardized railroad gauges in the US.

From the website on urban legends:

"In any case, railroads don't run through tunnels only "slightly wider than the railroad track" unless every one of their engines and all their rolling stock is also only "slightly wider than the railroad track." (And unless the tunnels encompass only a single set of tracks, of course). Data from the U.S. Army's Rail Transport in a Theater of Operations document, for example, makes it fairly clear that one would be hard-pressed to find railroad equipment anywhere only "slightly wider" than 4 feet, 8.5 inches."

I still like the story.

 

[clive francis]

Here is what my mate had to say about it:

"Good yarn and I don't want to urinate on your fire but...

4'8.5" was decided as the gauge for UK railways after
a survey was carried out on 100 carts and wagons.
4'8.5" was the average calculated by the engineer.
Carts and wagons were all different pitches and there
was no standardisation. Basically, the roads were
often made of mud so each wagon carved its own ruts.
Also, the Romans didn't colonize all of the UK so
wagons would certainly be built for roads that had
never seen a Roman.

Second point about tunnels. Have you seen a US train?
They're enormous (like everything over there). Where
Britain built small tunnels to lower the effort
required, the US built big tunnels for future
expansion. That's why our trains are very tube-like
and US ones were (are?) strange monstrosities (a bit
like some of their cars). Anyway, if you were
building boosters for spacecraft that wouldn't fit
through a tunnel, wouldn't you find an alternative way
of shipping rather than build them smaller? NASA's
the sort of organisation that would build their own
railway, just for this purpose.

As I said, good yarn, but it don't really hold
together.

Kev
Stepping _away_ from the soap box, nothing to see
here."

 

[Goeduck]

I did a little research to find out why 4' 8.5" was used as a standard for the width of the rail lines and here is what I found.

The "extra" one half inch was added to add a little free play for the rail car wheels.

The inside flanges of the rail car wheels are 4' 8" wide and having a track that wide wouldn't work, so the extra six inches was added.